Love & Darts Read online

And Time. No one savors moments like this, moments when you share personal speculations about who will probably win in all the baked goods categories. So. We wander over to the show ring.

  The hogs fill up the arena. We laugh at the smallest children showing the comparatively huge animals. They rush around the ring in their little Wranglers, boots, and tucked-in dress shirts. But we don’t laugh at their age or stature. We laugh in appreciation of their competence. They know everything about showing hogs: shine them; tap them with the little whips; keep the hogs between their bodies and the judges; move the animals along quickly so their ears flop and their haunches bounce on coquettish trotting hooves; and always keep both eyes right on that judge.

  We all fall in love with one tiny skinny boy in particular, because he’s so focused, so intent, so practiced, so self-assured, so competitive.

  He will grow up here, that boy showing those hogs. Knowing how. But we all grew up here. Not Mom. Not Dad. But the rest of us. The woman leaning over the fence grew up here. The man sitting next to me grew up here. I grew up here.

  And so I know everything that happens in this ring. There are auctions. There are dances. There are obstacle course races where greased-up kids hold greased-up watermelons and go under bales of hay, through kiddie pools of water, and shimmy around poles to ride scale-model tricycle-tractors towing stacked cinder blocks on skids. Fair Queen pageants go on here where girls win and girls lose. But today it is the hogs oiled up and glittered in the ring looking very good and showing off.

  The judging is over and there won’t be anything else going on in the ring for a while. So we head back towards the car but stop. Mom wants to walk through the poultry tent. So we do. The birds are preposterous. They are amazing forms of life. They are beautiful and clean and cocky. Before their necks are broken.

  She never asked to move here.

  “The Buff Orpingtons are my favorite,” she says. She holds his hand. And she knows that he’s dying. And she knows the chickens are dying. And she was still careful to park in the shade in July.

  CONVERSATIONS IN SILENCE

  Do you wake up blaming an insidious enemy for your flailing arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Do you wake up in a place unable to cope, understanding that some enemies never show their faces, would rather die than let you have a chance at a fair fight? I hate these demented shadows we cast ourselves with paranoia, self-doubt, and fear. I don’t know if we hide them or they hide us. You’re you, Daddy, but where’s the dignity gone?

  We are combatants, but how? Integrity, autonomy, and free will; my God, what transient jokes. Those shadows cower even if we won’t succumb. There’s no definitive mark of the divisions between us, between you now and who you once were. I don’t know what you call our overlap—solidarity, communion? Or. Just call it a lifetime of memory. And give me some image to assign to these few shared successive hours. I don’t care what image. A photo album will work. An old reel of 8 mm film will work, too. Or, yes, sure, a little postcard, a painting of seagulls dive bombing for breakfast. Yes, that will definitely work. Wedge it in the bathroom mirror frame. Forget about it. No. Don’t. Please don’t, ever. I don’t care. Not everything can be objectified. Just hand me a father to have forever when arbitrary things like misinterpreted train schedules force submission.

  But. Take all of that, that whole thing, and wrap it into one big image. Something enough, you know. Something bold and beautiful for both of us. Like maybe there’s some kind of skyward woman. Yeah. Grace of not-God. Not a ghost. Not a mermaid. But more than an apparition she is out somewhere in the fields singing to herself with everything you never told us. She is limber in her work and asks only for rain. I don’t know who she is. You never really said. But I don’t need to question things that help. What I know is, when she’s here, with you, with me, the wraiths recede. They go as soon as they hear her mandolin.

  And so what if anyone knows my father is not my father anymore—except that he is, but changing.

  Just after dark, on a bike, in September trees seem whiter than black but fading. We cannot wait to get past the present. Except that then he will be gone. There will be only photo albums. No 8 mm reels of film. No big, beautiful skyward woman. So I am coming home to be there, readied for the grief. I sort memories. There are backyard memories, kitchen memories, piano bench memories, Dairy Queen memories, hallway memories, front yard memories, memories from his work, memories from my school. Finally I walk into the bedroom, Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and find a few accessible memories there. With one foot on the floor, asleep before dinner, Dad is stretched out on his back taking a nap in the half-light. Thousands of times he lay like this. His image is etched somewhere deep in the everyday meld of what seems right, good, and just. I will never see him that way again. The house is sold.

  I hear her holler from the fields, “Keep it in the same tense, Missy.” And I laugh as the time twists over its Möbius swirl. It is all now and all removed from time as well. He is lying on the bed at home. He is lying on the couch. He is lying on the cot at Riverhead. He is lying on the floor in the living room. You say they are memories. And so be it. But what part of life would you choose to be most vivid when he is lying in a nursing home, dying? The past is certainly present; it’s what I choose.

  I hate to think you wake up unsure. Do you know what is happening, Dad? Do you blame an insidious enemy for your flailing arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Sometimes I sit here, seven hours apart, thinking of you there, in that chair that gets sterilized twice a day. But then I think of you there in the orange chair in the living room at home or sitting in a chair at our kitchen table grading papers. You had slow times then, didn’t you? So that eases the burden of how slow your time is now.

  She strums a G chord. “Keep it in the same tense, Missy.”

  It is tense.

  For some reason, the idea of your dying bothers me less than the fact that you will never again pour a bowl of Cheerios, top it with Quaker Honey Granola, two spoons of sugar, and milk. You will never have a dripping nose while shoveling snow in the driveway. You will never raise your eyebrows and smile after tickling my feet. You will never stand between me and the television at the most crucial point in a plot. You will never stamp your feet inside the door after coming in from the weather. You will never look skyward through countless vultures spiraling down on an updraft while driving seventy miles per hour on the interstate. You will stop looking for a Cooper’s hawk up high.

  How long the days seem to me sitting here, seven hours apart. No one talks about distance anymore. Everything’s a matter of time travel. There are silent conversations we all have with each other, with the wraiths, with the big, beautiful skyward women. Those conversations are just prayers, I guess, requests for understanding, dreams of being understood. I remember several days after the snows a mess of thistle seed and tiny sparrow foot prints at the base of the backyard feeder. The light was heartening. Do you remember when you cut the tops of the spruce trees for our Christmas trees? Those strange trees. In that morning snow light over thistle and sparrow footprints.

  They say it’s not really genetic.

  That maybe you soaked it in. There are your hands in the lamplight, the veins and tendons and length. Do you think this disease came from those years of washing your hands in the formaldehyde that brought corpses to the lab? I remember you laughing, scaring me by pulling a dead cat up out of a plastic barrel. There must have been fifty dead cats in there all submerged in preservative. You probably shouldn’t have just stuck your bare hand in there like that. It’s that kind of thinking that brings the wraiths. So I stare like you taught me to stare. And she is there again, singing. She is bent over her work and dutiful to the land. She pulls and works the fields. And she does not mind. And she knows what I never will know about you. She must. Someone must. You cannot go without someone knowing. Who is she? Who have you told your stories to, Daddy? Where can I find her?

  But she’s not telling. She sings, “Come and follow me. I�
��ll make you worthy. Come and follow me. I’ll make you fishers of men.”

  They say people, place, or thing. Fine. And the people hurt. And the places hurt. And things hurt. Your bird books. Your telescope. Your driving lessons. Your camera. Thoughts of your lawn-mowing shoes and red Heifer Project International hat. Your black socks. Your watch. Your desk chair. Those great scissors in your desk drawer. The tools. The shed. The paint. All of it. All of the integuments we knew of you.

  I imagine you so often. Awake and afraid. Asleep and unknowing. A moment of awareness and more and more hours of nothing.

  They told me the name of this thing you have, as if it mattered, as if I might want to know what exactly was happening and how.

  If it were anyone else, I would have looked it up.

  Give him a break, God. Let him be spared too much. Wherever he is, let him hear birds and see wildflowers in the ditches along the way. Make his journey quick. Do not betray him. He has worshipped this world’s beauty for seventy years. Let him be. Give him his freedom. Give him his peace. Give him his dignity back in our memories. Let him be. Just leave him alone. Leave him alone.

  And yet I laugh at that phrase. Our culture’s most